• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 15, 2006

AOL today will relaunch Netscape.com as a collaborative news portal along the lines of the popular Digg.com. Weblogs co-founder Jason Calacanis, who joined AOL last year, will head the project.

Similar to Digg, the new Netscape site invites users to submit news stories that they think are noteworthy, and to vote on them; the most popular stories will be given prominent placement on the site. Netscape additionally will include a social networking component, providing users with their own pages where they can share articles they find intriguing with others.

But--in a twist absent from Digg--AOL has hired a team of bloggers and editors, which it calls "anchors," to follow up on select stories with further reporting. For instance, the AOL anchors might return to sources and pose follow-up questions, or expand on a piece by adding more information about the subject.

A major goal of this initiative is to draw more users to AOL--the company's core strategy since last year, when it made all of its content available for free.

"In all of this, we're trying to build our audience. The hope here is that we get more people and get people to spend more time on the site," said Calacanis, who came to AOL last October when the media giant purchased Weblogs, the blog company he co-founded, for $25 million.

Aside from drawing eyeballs, the media giant also aims to create a new hybrid model of journalism that combines the non-hierarchical system of citizens voting on stories with a layer of professional review.

"The pot of gold is when the journalists that we've hired do their own investigation," Calacanis said. The eight full-time and 15 part-time anchors will scrutinize the articles submitted by users for accuracy, fairness, and completeness, among other qualities.

For example, one user in the recent closed testing period submitted a restaurant review that appeared in a daily newspaper. The Netscape anchor then contacted the restaurant manager to ask if the review was fair and accurate, and summarized the manager's response.

While many news organizations are struggling to harness the blogosphere, AOL's approach with Netscape appears unique, said Joe Laszlo, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research. "They're definitely carving out new territory for themselves," Laszlo said.

Traditional newspapers have tried to leverage the blogosphere by, for example, asking reporters to start blogging, or incorporating Technorati links at the end of stories, so users can see what bloggers are saying about articles simply by clicking on a link. But AOL appears to be the first major company to take consumers' opinions as the starting point and then overlay an editorial process, Laszlo said. "The new Netscape is probably going to be a pioneer," he said.

The portal will be monetized with ads and, in connection with the launch, AOL intends to introduce a new, extra-wide unit--a 1,500x90 banner ad it's calling a "super leaderboard"--to be displayed to users with 24-inch or 30-inch monitors. (The new Netscape.com site will be available in a widescreen version for users with large monitors.)

Netscape--the dominant Web browser in the mid-1990s until Microsoft's Internet Explorer crowded it out--was purchased by AOL in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, for more than $9 billion. While Netscape still exists as a browser, its market share shrunk to just over 1 percent by the end of last year, according to analytics company NetApplications.

As a portal, Netscape.com drew 11.2 million unique visitors last month--making it the sixth most popular portal, according to comScore Media Metrix. Yahoo led the field with 130.1 million uniques, followed by MSN (100.6 million), AOL (86.8 million), MySpace.com (51.4 million) and Lycos (24.4 million).

Collaborative sites are smaller for now, but have been growing rapidly. Digg.com last month garnered 1.3 million unique visitors--a 924 percent increase from the site's 129,000 users in May 2005, according to comScore. Slashdot drew 432,000--up 25 percent from last year's 345,000--and Del.icio.us (purchased last year by Yahoo) captured 350,000.

The new Netscape site will launch on a test basis today and will officially debut July 1.